Jeremy Nguyen in the 7/20/20 New Yorker:
(#1) “This is the precise reason I didn’t want bamboo flooring.”
Everybody knows that pandas eat bamboo, but what they eat is bamboo-bamboo, the shoots (and sometimes leaves and stems) of several bamboo species, not items made from the stems or fibers of the plant — furniture, other household furnishings, fabrics, and, yes, flooring.
Yes, the joke turns on a systematic metonymy, an ambiguity between reference to a plant and reference to items created from parts of that plant.
So: pandas and bamboo and metonymy too.
